It was made public as early as 2007 by Seymour Hersh in his report "The Redirection" published in the New Yorker that the US, Israel, Saudi Arabia and others were gathering, funding, arming, and deploying a front of violent sectarian extremists, many with ties to Al Qaeda, to undermine, destabilize, and eventually lead to the overthrow of the governments of Lebanon, Syria, and Iran. The violent campaign was rolled out publicly in the wake of a similarly premeditated geopolitical ploy, the so-called "Arab Spring," and has since then been clearly exposed as the work of violent terrorist networks. Ironically, these terrorist networks are those allegedly the impetus of the "War on Terror," now paradoxically being funded, armed, and politically backed by the West.

In fact, the true nature of Syria's "rebels" has become so well known, that recent attempts to sway public opinion with continued, but unsubstantiated reports of "atrocities" aimed at demonizing the Syrian government have been met with skepticism, doubt, and even indignation by the public - giving nations like Russia and China not only the opportunity to defy Western dictates, but a moral imperative to do so as well.

Collapsing Legitimacy Leads to Collapsing Empires

The global hegemony of Wall Street and London has been built behind a facade of "human rights," "freedom," and "democracy." As these principles are eroded back home in the West, their use for dressing up otherwise naked imperialism, corporate monopolization, and military aggression abroad has become overt and increasingly ineffective.

While the US Secretary of State attempts to blame Russia and China for "holding up progress" in the West's campaign of premeditated destabilization in Syria, it is more likely that the West's own loss of legitimacy is the true reason it has not successfully convinced the world to go along with what is increasingly appearing to be a self-serving and very untenable agenda.

Should the US fail in its attempts to overthrow the government of Syria, and quite likely even if it does manage to succeed at this late hour, so much damage has been done to the West's credibility, as well as to the credibility of its allegedly independent institutions, that future gambits will be even more difficult to execute. As the West's economy and geopolitical power crumbles and its reach becomes less subtle and more adversarial, shareholders will seek more secure investments, financially, politically, and even tactically.

Maintaining an empire relies on an immense global infrastructure the West still possesses - but it is an infrastructure that is meeting competition from not only rival hegemonies, but from within individual nations as well, on both a national and grassroots level. Empires are also built on psychological factors such as faith in one's institutions and fear of one's military prowess. The West has been increasingly faltering in all respects in a world where these concepts are becoming increasingly challenged by shifting social, economic, and technological paradigms.

What the West should be doing is positioning itself for this changing world - instead it is clinging to a crumbling empire, scrambling to build a global paradigm rendered antiquated long before it has even been implemented. Boycotting the corporate-financier interests behind this attempt at establishing global hegemony will accelerate and ensure its failure - while resolving ourselves to creating genuine institutions on a local and national level for and by the people will ensure that we are not left in disarray once these corrupt globalist institutions are rendered moot.